NASA has set its sights on the moon’s south pole in its quest for ice.
This week, the space agency and the company Intuitive Machines announced Shackleton Crater landing site at the south pole of the moon for a small lander set to launch next year. The location is called the “Shackleton connecting ridge” and NASA data hint at ice lurking below the surface, the agency said in a statement on Nov. 3.
The robotic mission includes NASA’s Polar Resources Ice-Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) that requires solar power and a view of Earth for communications. The ridge zone should provide both, NASA said.
“Finding a landing location where we might discover ice within three feet of the surface was challenging,” Jackie Quinn, PRIME-1 project manager at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, said in the statement.
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